New ways to engage customers in co-designing your company's future - a weblog to complement the book, Outside Innovation, by Patty Seybold

Description

What is Outside Innovation?

It’s when customers lead the design of your business processes, products, services, and business models. It’s when customers roll up their sleeves to co-design their products and your business. It’s when customers attract other customers to build a vital customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services.
The good news is that customer-led innovation is one of the most predictably successful innovation processes.
The bad news is that many managers and executives don’t yet believe in it. Today, that’s their loss. Ultimately, it may be their downfall.

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Observations

LEAD USERS

Eric von Hippel coined the term "lead users" to describe a group of both customers and non-customers who are passionate about getting certain things accomplished. They may not know or care about the products or services you offer. But they do care about their project or need. Lead users have already explored innovative ways to get things done. They're usually willing to share their approaches with others.

LEAD CUSTOMERS

I use the term "lead customers" to describe the small percentage of your current customers who are truly innovative. These may not be your most vocal customers, your most profitable customers, or your largest customers. But they are the customers who care deeply about the way in which your products or services could help them achieve something they care about.

LEAD CUSTOMERS AND LEAD USERS

We’ve spent the last 25 years identifying, interviewing, selecting, and grouping customers together to participate in our Customer Scenario® Mapping sessions. Over the years, we’ve learned how to identify the people who will contribute the most to a customer co-design session. These are the same kinds of people you should be recruiting when you set out to harness customer-led innovation.

HOW DO YOU WIN IN INNOVATION?

You no longer win by having the smartest engineers and scientists; you win by having the smartest customers!

CUSTOMER CO-DESIGN

In more than 25 years of business strategy consulting, we’ve found that customer co-design is a woefully under-used capability.

August 09, 2014

CaringBridge: An Almost Perfect Customer Ecosystem

If you haven’t heard of CaringBridge.org, you should know about it. Eventually you, or someone in your family, will be dealing with a major health issue. CaringBridge provides the support infrastructure to deal with one of the most important, highly emotional, and time-consuming activities that a care-giving family has to deal with: keeping everyone in the loop. Email and/or Facebook work, but they’re not ideal for keeping everyone informed about the latest updates on someone’s battle with cancer, or the prognosis of someone who has just been in a horrific accident.

There are probably newer, spiffier e-tools available. But CaringBridge has something none of the upstarts have: 17 years of experience helping families deal with their health journeys. One of the things that I have learned from working with true Pioneers, is that when you devote ten+ years to understanding and addressing a customer-critical activity—whether that customer’s activity is designing an energy-efficient mobile phone, or managing IT resources, or dealing with a family’s health crisis—your understanding and experience trump all challengers. You deeply understand what the customer’s context is, what they’re trying to accomplish and what’s important to them as they do it. You don’t get distracted by side journeys because you are grounded in solving a real problem for real people: helping them get something done as easily as possible.

When you are fanatically-focused on streamlining and supporting an activity that is critical to a large group of customers, people, patients, or end-users, you gain momentum by word of mouth. People tell others. They recruit new customers for you. They discover the community of other customers who are using your tools. They let you know what else they need and want.

You attract partners—in CaringBridge’s case, hospitals, other healthcare nonprofits, and organizations that are supporting the same customer scenario. This organic, almost magnetic, attraction of a community of customers who are trying to deal with the same activity, along with supporting players whose role is to help or to be support that activity—that’s a customer ecosystem.

CaringBridge seems to me to be an almost perfect example. What’s not perfect? Well, perhaps they err too much on the relentless marketing side. Having signed up to create a site for a family member, now, every time I’m online, CaringBridge is in my face telling me to come back. That’s really not necessary. When you have a health crisis, you don’t need to be reminded about it. If you’re not in crisis, but just planning ahead for the eventual demise of an aging loved one, you don’t need to be pestered.

While researching solutions for my dog's lameness, I get a reminder to "come back to CaringBridge" -- That's not appropriate!

But take a look: a nonprofit that is providing valuable service to 500,000 people a day and survives on donations alone, is pretty impressive! That’s a successful customer ecosystem.

Families and friends use CaringBridge.org’s mobile app, social media outreach, and website tools to provide emotional support during a family’s health crisis. Each patient has a journal for providing updates (by the patient or family member) and a guest book where friends, family, colleagues and new friends can track the patient’s progress and lend support. CaringBridge is a great example of a “Customer Ecosystem” – a network comprised of individuals and organizations all of whom are focused on one thing: helping a patient get better and a family heal.

CaringBridge is a customer ecosystem that has evolved organically to support a critical customer scenario: Someone I love is very sick and I need to keep my friends and family up-to-date. So, it started in 1997 as a simple website that patients’ families could use to post updates to notify family members and friends.

Over its 17 years, CaringBridge has grown in size (500,000 daily visitors, 75,000 new patient sites created last year, and 2.25 million new registered users in 2013) and in scope. And, it has attracted 46 million consumers and thousands of hospitals, clinics, and healthcare non-profits as sponsors and affiliates. But CaringBridge remains focused on its original mission: supporting families who are in the midst of a health crisis.